Ruth Hale wrote for numerous major newspapers and magazines, and working for the Philadelphia Public Ledger she became the first widely-read female drama critic. Politically active, she spoke and wrote against the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists convicted of murder in a trial of questionable integrity, and after their executions she became an activist against capital punishment. She was better known, however, for her feminism. She was the wife of newspaper columnist Heywood Broun but did not adopt his last name, and in 1921 she was refused an American passport unless her name was listed as "Ruth Hale Broun". In protest she and her husband cancelled their plans to visit Europe, and Hale established the Lucy Stone League, a group that advocates for women's legal right to keep their last names upon marriage. She made headlines later that same year when she and Broun purchased a home and, after some legal wrangling, successfully had the deed issued to both of them as separate persons, not as Mr & Mrs Heywood Broun -- a first in New York history.

Hale was also an occasional stage actress, wrote the Broadway adaptation of Elinor Wylie's novel The Venetian Glass Nephew, and dined often with Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx and friends at the Algonquin Round Table. Near the end of her life she divorced Broun, a parting she described as "gentle, quiet and refined". She said they remained in love, and they continued essentially living together, but she had "always wanted to be an old maid". She died thirteen months after their divorce, with her ex-husband at her side. Their son, Heywood Hale Broun, became a familiar television sportscaster.